


The Animals in the Pit

by mediest



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Battle Royale Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:53:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23221276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mediest/pseuds/mediest
Summary: Dying is like losing your virginity. It happens, one way or another. If you’re lucky, it happens with someone special.-The Blue Lions are selected for this year’s Battle Royale.
Comments: 16
Kudos: 195





	The Animals in the Pit

**Author's Note:**

> this is a battle royale fic and contains all the depictions of violence & death that one would expect from a battle royale fic! mind the tags please. this time I stole from: a buddhist parable, the pied piper legend, and the russian folktale "the animals in the pit"

Galatea after Fraldarius. Ingrid’s card is unlucky: number twenty-one out of thirty. She’ll be at a disadvantage, being among the last students to enter the arena. 

From Seteth, she accepts an animal skin pack and secures it over her shoulders. It weighs less than she’d anticipated. She returns to her position in line. Felix’s gaze cuts towards her briefly, then away again. 

Gautier after Galatea. The Archbishop welcomes Sylvain forward with a beatific smile. She stands in ceremonial white and green, cast in the radiant light of her audience chambers. To his credit, Sylvain does not waver as he approaches her. He selects a card, reads it, and takes his pack. When he turns back around, there’s irony in his expression. He winks at Ingrid without smiling. 

The order is determined, the supplies distributed. The Archbishop folds both hands against her stomach and addresses them all.

“Children of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus.” Her voice is low and melodic. “A century ago, your ancestors spilled blood for independence. By the grace of the Goddess, we the Church of Seiros permitted your King of Lions his golden crown. The price of this freedom will be paid today.”

To Ingrid’s right, a shoulder brushes against hers. To her left, a hand touches the small of her back before retreating.

If there was ever a time the three of them were able to be so gentle while looking at each other instead of forward, awaiting death—Ingrid cannot locate the memory. 

“Sons and daughters of Loog,” says the Archbishop, “you fight for your continued right to self-determination. The hand of the Goddess is upon you. May she guide your sword and spirit in righteous tribute.”

Ingrid is the twenty-first. The warp leaves her unsteady on her feet. She gathers her bearings swiftly: it’s noon, and the sun is high but obscured by a wave of clouds. She can smell a body of water nearby, but can’t yet see it. In front of her lies a thick emerald forest, mist crowning the treetops. Behind her, hilly red-green fields dome into a distant summit. Atop the summit sits an old collapsed castle and its overgrown garden. 

She chooses the forest. 

She runs until she’s far from the open field but not deep enough to get lost. She jumps down a rock ledge, where tree roots crawl over layers of limestone. She sits with her back against the bedrock and opens her pack. Inside is a canteen of water, a roll of woven cloth to serve as either a cloak or bedding, and a weapon: a single arrow. 

Good enough. Ingrid takes the arrowhead to her braid. She unties and hacks her hair off section by section, leaving a bed of blonde moss at the foot of a tree.

A peripheral motion stops her. 

Student nineteen is tall, reedy. Frozen less than twenty paces away. Ingrid recalls when he got his growth spurt. Decent with an axe, but what he’s holding in his hands is a simple wooden club.

She rises into a low crouch. Nineteen’s expression tells Ingrid he’s afraid, but he thinks his odds are good. 

There are elegant and honorable ways to kill, and there are ways to kill with a hard heart and savage desperation. Ingrid has no illusions about which is required of her here. A slice of her arrow slashes nineteen’s esophagus open. He grabs at his throat, gurgling, his eyes wide and green like hers. Blood pours through his fingers. 

When he falls to the ground, Ingrid goes with him. She straddles his torso and stabs the arrow into his neck. The shaft splinters apart in her grip.

If she had her lance, she would’ve done this better. That’s what she has to continue to tell herself.

Ingrid drags herself off nineteen’s body, onto her hands and knees. A breeze hits the back of her bare neck. 

She shuts her eyes and collects herself. 

She doesn’t have her lance, but she has a wooden club now, and an extra canteen. She pours an inch of water into her cupped palm and splashes it against her face. The clouds pass to allow the sun in through the treetops, yellow light speckling the forest floor. Ingrid tilts her head up. She has been bathed and groomed. She taps her own shoulders—right first, then left. She recites the oath, her lips moving without sound. There’s no one to hear it, only herself. 

Unlike white magic, black magic is not forbidden inside the arena. In the daytime, Annette is clouded by the sulfurous smell of burnt hair. During the evening, it’s the smell of firewood and cooking squirrel meat. The smoke rises thick and gauzy in the sky. 

She’d been warped right into the lake. By mistake or intention, it was impossible to know. The water hit her waist and her boots sank into the soft soil. It surprised her, the immediacy of her own instinct. How instantly all the dread and terror could be overwritten by a single, clear siren in her head: live. 

She fought her way towards land. Her skirt became ensnared in the dense vegetation, so she tore it off. When she looked up again, Dedue was standing there on the shore, watching her. Annette stopped, her breath trapped in her throat. She couldn’t see Dedue’s eyes from this distance. Dedue’s view was no better, but whatever he saw in her made him lower his hatchet. 

That first day, as they journeyed together from the lake to the fields, Dedue received a shallow injury: a javelin whizzing past his right shoulder. He let out a pained grunt. 

At the top of the hill, student seven disappeared running back the way he’d come.

Annette felt like she was being pulled into a tunnel. Her heart was beating so fast it made her chest hurt. 

“There will be more like him,” Dedue said lowly. His voice dragged her back into the open field, with the high sun, and Dedue’s bloody arm. “It would be safer for you if we parted ways here.”

He took his hatchet from his belt and went stalking after his attacker. Annette watched herself watch him go, from halfway down that tunnel, where the world was dark and heavy and far from reach. Then she watched herself yank the javelin free from the earth and follow after Dedue up the hill. 

It was clear Dedue recognized seven. There were many who’d looked on Dedue with malice and suspicion at the academy. Without Dimitri, it would be open hunting season.

Annette recognized seven too. They’d taken their mage certification exams together. She saw from the top of the hill as he no longer attempted to run. He raised both arms. They sparked with menacing light. 

Annette was quicker: she cast fire faster and further than she’d ever done before. 

The only sound in her ears was her own erratic breathing. She knew seven was screaming, but she couldn’t hear it.

Dedue finished the rest. 

By the time Annette came down the hill, Dedue had already dislodged his hatchet from seven’s breastbone. He was cleaning the wet blade against the grass. 

Seven’s hair had melted into his cheek. His eyelids had burned off. His skin sloughed off in flaky sheets. Annette’s senses came flooding back to her, in all their treacherous enormity. She was back in the lake, and the water was in her boots and her ankles were entangled by the aquatic weeds and she was being consumed. She caught the musty odor of mildew on her damp clothes. Her sleeves were singed by her own fire. 

“Annette,” came Dedue’s grave, careful voice. 

Annette swallowed her nausea but let herself look away from the corpse, as a compromise. “I don’t have anything to stitch your wound with, but I can cauterize it for you.”

Dedue told her, “You do not have to.”

Annette said, “Please. I’d like to,” and then she didn’t know how to say more, but thankfully Dedue agreed.

A day later, Dedue’s shoulder appears to be healing normally. They eat together over the fire and afterwards Dedue offers to take first watch. Annette curls up on the ground and sleeps without dreaming. She rouses only to Dedue gently shaking her arm. The stars are alight beyond his face.

“My turn?” Annette yawns. “I hope I wasn’t too difficult to wake.”

Dedue shakes his head. “You are easy to watch over,” he says. “His Highness slept half as deeply.”

Annette understands. She sleeps like a person who has never been lost in the wilderness before, not truly. She’s not the last of anything, neither a family or a nation. 

Dedue sleeps like a person who doesn’t feel secure in his surroundings. He makes no sound, but reacts to every noise—a twitch in his broad shoulders as he’s reeled back up to the surface of consciousness by the fire’s crackle, or the call of a coyote far away. His brow furrows. It’s already a great signal of trust that he has allowed himself to fall asleep beside her at all. She wonders: by the end, will she compromise on this too?

Annette looks back into the fire. She waits for the night to end. The coyotes keep howling. She doesn’t want to die, but she doesn’t want to win either. 

Ashe isn’t a hunter, but there are other ways to survive, and he’s gone with less food before. At sunset he hears the Church horns: one long, mournful note for every person Ashe has outlasted. For ten years Gaspard has been overrun with a foreign species of rabbit. A small litter was gifted from Brigid to the Empire, before a couple of them somehow found their way across Magdred Way. They’re wild, invasive, and wreak immeasurable damage to the region’s crops. They breed like the world’s ending. They’ve withstood poisoned bait and fire; they’ve grown immune to strains of rabbit-killing virus. “They’re territorial little creatures,” Lonato told Ashe once, after a farmer visited the court petitioning for the aid of his lord’s hunting dogs. “They find their acre of land and learn every inch of it, above and below ground.” Then he smiled at Ashe and said, “Clever beasts. Impossible to flush out.”

This morning, it rains. The birds sing noisily once the storm ceases, flying from tree to tree. Ashe knows all the quietest footholds: moss, rock, and bare earth. It’s easier to stay silent when the ground is soft and wet. It’s also easier to be tracked. 

On each step, he rolls his weight forward from the back of his foot, nice and gentle. Twenty yards east, there’s a dying elm, surrounded by morel mushrooms. 

Then all the breath is slammed out of his lungs and Ashe is being pinned from behind against the forest floor.

Blood fills his mouth. He must’ve bitten his cheek on the way down. He tries shoving himself up, fingers scrabbling against the dirt, and a forearm slots against Ashe’s neck and forces him back down. The side of his face sinks against the muddy leaves. A knotted root digs into his gut. Ashe wheezes, panicked.

A ruthless weight settles across his back. “Don’t move.”

Shit. 

“Hey, Felix,” Ashe breathes. 

“Where’s your weapon,” says Felix. 

When Ashe is silent, Felix’s voice becomes a growl: “Ashe.”

“Dagger, strapped to my hip.”

Felix searches with the hand that isn’t holding Ashe by the neck. Ashe doesn’t struggle again. A hunting dog’s grip will loosen when it believes the rabbit is dead. 

Felix finds the dagger. It’s well-made: good balance and heft, almost the length of a short sword. Quick and deadly in the hands of somebody like Felix. Ashe fights to keep his breathing even. The back of his eyes burn.

Then Felix stands, and Ashe is suddenly free. 

“Get up,” Felix says. 

Ashe gets up, leg muscles tensed. If he sprints, will Felix chase?

“I’m not going to kill you,” Felix says, with his sharp face and a splatter of browned blood drying across the front of his school uniform, so forgive Ashe if he doesn’t totally relax. 

“Have you?” Ashe asks. “Killed anyone yet?”

Felix’s eyes drill into Ashe’s. He doesn’t respond. Instead he reaches into his pack and tosses Ashe a coil of sturdy woven rope.

Ashe catches it. It’s not a fair trade; it’s charity.

“Stay out of my way,” Felix says, in equal parts hard and brittle. “Don’t let me see you again.”

Ashe doesn’t move. Felix casts him a final look, then vanishes into the woods, towards the castle ruins. 

As soon as Felix is out of range, Ashe sucks in a trembling gasp of air. His adrenaline peaks so fast, reflexive tears spring to his eyes. 

Out in Gaspard farmland, hundreds of rabbits lay dead across ravaged pastures, deep inside their underground burrows. Life is cheap everywhere; it’s the aftermath that’s costly. When disease finally took Ashe’s parents, he couldn’t afford a burial. He paid for their cremation and stole the first loaf of bread that kept himself and his siblings fed for five days. That’s how much Ashe has been told his own survival is worth. A sack of apples. A set of silverware. A length of rope. 

He wipes his sleeve against his hot, damp face. He unwraps the rope, ties a series of knots, and throws a loop up until it catches on a high branch. He climbs up and keeps climbing.

The old castle ruins are a maze of dead plants and broken clay and ceramic garden features. Dedue identifies the stubborn perennials, struggling to breathe under the nettles and weeds. Overgrown ivy has infiltrated the stone.

They find Dimitri in what was once the great hall. There is no longer a ceiling, and the walls have crumbled to half their original height, green with moss. 

Dimitri sits by the rubble of the fireplace at the center of the room, looking at nothing. 

“Annette,” he says when he notices them. He sounds as though he is digging his voice back up from deep below the earth. “Dedue?”

“Your Highness,” Dedue says, approaching, while Annette says on a delay, “Your Highness,” and lingers back. “Are you injured?” 

“No,” Dimitri says, slowly, concentrating. “You found me.” 

Amidst the plants were several bodies. Some were more brutalized than others. Annette had turned her gaze away as they climbed the uneven stairs. 

In the morning Annette is gone. She has taken only her own share of the supplies. Her departure upsets Dimitri, his mood sour and suspicious from bad dreams. Dedue asks him to drink some water. This helps.

The battle royale crowns one winner, just as Dedue’s compass points in one direction. He’s grateful to Annette for relieving him of the decision. 

There is fireweed and chicory growing untamed in the garden. Dedue collects the flowers and the younger, more tender and edible leaves. From this height, a hush falls over the arena. A tall smudge of red can be spotted near the lakeshore. In the forest, something panther-like moves with slick, ferocious intent. They will both arrive soon enough. 

“I believe we’re not far from the Tailtean Plains,” Dimitri says, later that afternoon when he joins Dedue. He follows Dedue’s example, scraping roots of their outer covering, splitting open the stems of old plants in order to eat the raw pith. 

“You recognize this place?” asks Dedue.

“The lake is familiar to me.”

For a moment they continue to work silently. Something causes Dimitri to flinch. The resulting spasm of his arm unroots a weed with violent, trembling strength. 

Dedue thinks to reach for him, Dimitri’s shoulder, but ultimately he stays his hand. 

In their youth they’d been able to speak to each other well before Dedue had fully known Fódlan’s language. In the way anyone can see and understand the wordless anguish of magpies gathered around a fallen friend, crying and screeching, laying grass by the body. Ocean mammals will carry their dead young on their backs for miles. In Duscur, it was said that a whale sighting bought you a wish. The forked shape of their tails resembled a wishbone. Fhirdiad was far from the sea, but Dimitri’s eyes were a preternatural blue and inside of them was Dedue’s reflected image, his grief and rage and impossible loneliness given form and howling voice through Dimitri’s grief and rage and impossible loneliness. 

“Dedue,” Dimitri says, “may I ask something of you?”

“Of course,” Dedue responds. “I am here.”

“I ask that you fight not for me, but yourself,” Dimitri says. “If it is to be the two of us, in the end, then I ask that you not forfeit yourself to me.”

“Your Highness.”

“Dimitri,” Dimitri interrupts.

“Your Highness,” Dedue says again, and perhaps he allows too much of himself to leak out this second time. “Your country would not welcome my survival over yours.”

An understatement. If Dedue were to be the last one standing, Faerghus would kill him for it. 

Dimitri goes silent, despairing. Seeing no other choice, Dedue touches his hand to Dimitri’s shoulder. 

As the years pass, certain sentiments have become harder to express. It’s difficult to give them vocabulary. The identical garden of bodies he piled on his path to finding Dimitri—is that devotion? The belief he holds in Dimitri above all others—is that love?

“You have said that in saving my life, you saved yourself,” Dedue says. “It is the same for me. Please, permit me to guard your victory. I wish for you to win, and live.”

Dimitri shudders and admits, “I fear I cannot do both.”

In the parable of the second arrow, the Goddess asks: if you are struck by an arrow, do you then shoot another arrow into yourself? Although you have felt pain, do you allow yourself to suffer even further in your response to that pain? 

When Mercedes is warped into the arena, she makes a decision. She refuses to allow herself to suffer further. Suffering has no divine meaning. Its purpose lies in war and politics, and Mercedes is a woman of faith.

Mercedes does: walk, and keep herself hydrated, and play on her own terms. She provides comfort to those she encounters who are dying alone in the forest. She prays for them, when they ask her to. 

Mercedes does not: run, or kill, or avoid her classmates, though they do their best to avoid her. She comes to the realization that her classmates don’t feel very comfortable with the thought of killing her. It appears they’re all waiting for someone else to get the job done instead. Maybe they’re waiting for her to starve.

On the fifth day, their wish is granted.

It’s a snare more commonly intended to trap game: hares, wild pigs, deer. The barbed wire carves into Mercedes’ left thigh. Struggling makes it cut deeper. Her skirt grows heavy, staining red. 

It takes her hours to free herself. Her trapper never comes. By the end her leg is mangled, her hands are torn. She sweats all the moisture out of her body. The effort exhausts her. 

She walks on, limping, lightheaded. Even slower, now, though she’s never been particularly fast. 

At the forest’s edge, Mercedes finds her.

“Oh,” she murmurs, her heart twisting inside her chest. 

Ingrid has not been dead long. There is still some warmth to her. Her skin is bruised from the accumulation of blood pooled inside her body. Her killer has done her the honor of laying her on her back, hands clasping her weapon at the center of her breast. 

Some believe the soul resides within the body for three days. By that timeline, Mercedes is not late. She lies down next to Ingrid. She curls onto her side and strokes her fingers through Ingrid’s hair. When did she cut it? It’s a rough chop, but the length suits the shape of her lovely face. 

The factions of the Church of Seiros each differ in their understanding of life after death. The Western Church teaches that with good deeds comes peace, and with evil deeds comes torment. But the Eastern Church views heaven and hell as one and the same. The Goddess does not punish; she merely offers you her presence. To accept her love is to experience grace. To reject it is to condemn and torment yourself. 

Mercedes turns onto her back. Her throat is parched. And above her the clouds keep moving, and the robins are flying, and the blue sky and the land are softening together under the sun, in all their incalculable beauty. 

Dying is like losing your virginity. It happens, one way or another. If you’re lucky, it happens with someone special. Someone who’ll make it good for you. 

The Church horns blow as the sun starts to set. Sylvain’s vision adjusts to the blue cast of twilight. The shadow approaching across the field grows in dimension and detail: the slim muscled shoulders, the unraveling knot of hair, the intense eyes. 

Felix is easy to find. His final destination is unswerving, immortal.

“Hey,” Sylvain greets, standing up, a loose grip on his scythe. His starter weapon had been a vial of poison—not his style. He’d picked up a pair of brass gauntlets from student two, a round wooden shield from student twenty-four, before he eventually struck gold with student thirteen. She’d put up an incredible fight. Sylvain has the gash in his abdomen to prove it, blood oozing through his shirt.

There’s a dark purple bruise on Felix’s forehead. The rest of what’s hurting him, Sylvain can’t make out in this light.

“Move aside,” Felix says.

“You’re up late,” Sylvain says. “Nice night for some light treason?”

Felix’s fingers twitch towards the dagger at his hip. 

“You can barely stand,” Felix says. “What do you think is going to happen here?” 

If everyone plays their roles right, there’s only one thing that was ever going to happen. Sylvain flexes his hand around the staff of his scythe. Moving hurts like hell, but he wants to make this look good.

“Sorry, Felix,” Sylvain says sincerely.

There it is on Felix’s face: the cold emotion becoming hot. He unsheathes his dagger. The soft, diffused glow of nightfall makes his face less angular. He looks like he’s been fighting for a long time. 

“Come on, then,” Felix says, with a voice of rusted steel. “If you want to die so badly.”

Sylvain gives him a lethal grin. 

He can’t make it too easy. Felix would never forgive him for that. Sylvain has the advantage when it comes to range: his scythe grazes Felix at the waist and thighs before Felix can even begin to touch him. 

But Felix is good, inevitably fast. Eventually he springs close enough to get past the scythe and just tackles Sylvain bare-knuckled to the ground. 

Felix is a vicious little brawler, always has been. Crushes his elbow right into Sylvain’s fucking stomach wound. Sylvain cries out, dazed, pained. 

He tries to throw Felix off. Felix pins his right arm and then slams the crossguard of his dagger down against Sylvain’s wrist. So that hand’s definitely broken now. 

The unbroken hand is bleeding too, Sylvain’s palm soaking the blade as he grabs it directly. Felix pushes down harder. 

Sylvain’s losing focus. How long have they been doing this? The tip of a dagger has hovered an inch above Sylvain’s chest for an entire lifetime. If Felix can’t kill Sylvain, how does he expect to kill Dimitri?

Felix’s breathing is wild and ragged. His hands shake.

The pain, when it comes, is something Sylvain has prepared for. He’s been bleeding out since the sun was still in the sky. At this point he just feels tired. Ingrid would hate this, the slowness, the apathy, the big fucking nothing. Is she gone already? Was it good for her, at least? Will it be good for Felix when he razes his world to the ground, searching for that grain of purpose at the center? Is there anyone left in this country who’s able to just kill or live or die for themselves anymore?

It’s not as if Sylvain is letting himself off the hook here. He’s just as bad, blinking into Felix’s face, watching it get blurrier and blurrier. 

Felix chokes out a noise as he pulls the dagger out of Sylvain’s chest. Sylvain wants to tell Felix it’s okay, but he doesn’t want to be an asshole, saying something that’d only piss Felix off right now. 

Still, if you laid all the options out side by side—drowned in a deep well, frozen on a tall peak, or this—there’s no contest. It’s too dark now to see Felix’s expression, but Sylvain isn’t so cold yet that he can’t feel Felix’s hand on his chest, wet and warm, bloodied with his heart’s miserable last efforts. There are many worse ways to die. 

As he climbs the summit, Felix is certain of a few things. 

First: he’s hurt. He has slept little, eaten less. The cut to his upper thigh, Sylvain’s parting gift, is shallow but enough to slow him down. His head still pounds from the impact of Ingrid’s wooden club to his temple. The moon is his only light source. In the darkness he can see both of their faces.

Second: nobody should make any promises when they’re a child. Children don’t understand anything. They believe too strongly in permanence. They don’t know that when the fire comes, it takes everything—the trees, the foundations, the knight, the prince. The smoke lingers, poisoning the air. As he grows older, Felix recalls with less and less clarity the last time he’d felt safe. 

Standing in the harsh light of the rose windows and stained glass, looking into the face of a dragon of a woman, Felix had been certain of this too: the battle royale is Dimitri’s to win, and winning will destroy whatever is left of him.

It is sunrise at the top of the summit, piercing through the fog, and there is Dimitri, and Dedue beside him. 

From his stance, Dedue intends to engage him first, but it’s Dimitri who steps forward. 

“Felix,” says Dimitri. He wields a ball-and-chain flail and no armor in his expression. His weariness is open and plain. “I’m glad to see you alive.”

“Don’t,” Felix grinds out. Don’t speak. Don’t pretend. Don’t look at me like that. 

Is he a match for Dimitri? Does it matter? There is no one else who can do this. If Felix loses, then at least he doesn’t have to watch a broken animal receive a crown.

If Felix wins, then Dimitri can finally rest.

Towards the end, it begins to rain. Felix drops to his knees. He spits out a mouthful of watery blood. It washes away slowly against the stone floor.

Breathing is painful. The flail broke a rib or four when it struck his chest. The iron spikes gripped into his flesh. His shoulder dislocated after Dimitri threw him bodily into a wall. Felix stares at his right arm, hanging out of its socket, and snarls at it. _Move._

Dimitri’s presence looms above him, blocking out some of the rain. He’s carrying his weight on his right leg, bleeding from his left. Felix meets the beast’s gaze and looks for what he always looks for.

“Felix,” Dimitri says, low and wretched in his triumph.

Felix grasps for his dagger lost on the floor with all the strength he has remaining. Beyond Dimitri, Dedue tenses. 

Dimitri’s head. That would be the most effective place to aim. The collarbone, throat. Either of his knees. His groin, his fucking foot. 

Felix’s arm falls back to his side uselessly. The dagger drops into his lap.

Dimitri lets out a wounded noise and makes no further move either. This is when Dedue advances at last through the thickening haze of the rain. 

Felix coughs, sucks in a damp and injured breath. He has begun to shiver. The rainwater is cool, sluicing the mud and gore from their bodies. He knows that Dedue, with a steady hand, will aim for the heart. Felix isn’t sure where else to look as it happens, so he keeps looking at Dimitri.

During the Guardian Moon, when the blizzards are at their worst and winter beats its fists against the windows, there is a common Faerghus folktale that many parents read to their children. King Lambert was among them. He gathered his son into his lap and said: 

A village outside Fhirdiad faced a rat infestation. One day a man appeared, dressed in a coat of bright and colorful cloth. He said he was a ratcatcher, and that in return for a payment he would rid the city of all mice and rats. The villagers struck a deal, promising him a certain price. 

Thereupon the ratcatcher took a small fife from his pocket and began to play. Rats and mice immediately came from every house and gathered around him. He lured them away towards the lake, where along the road there was a deep, broad pit. The animals all followed him and fell one by one into the hole. When they became hungry, they ate each other down to their bones, until the final rat starved.

Now that the villagers had been freed of their plague, they regretted having promised so much money and, using all kinds of excuses, they refused to compensate him.

When he saw that he was to receive nothing, the ratcatcher once again walked through the town’s streets with his fife, as he had done before. Hearing the music, all the young children of the village, boys and girls, came from their homes. 

They followed dancing at the ratcatcher’s feet towards the lake. Neither he nor the children were ever seen again.

“What happened to them?” asked Dimitri.

“Nobody knows,” said King Lambert, affecting a playful mysterious voice, as the wind outside cried and cried. “What do you think, my little wolf?” 

That night Dimitri dreamt the truth. They were all still in the pit, crawling, ravenous. Nobody had climbed out.


End file.
